Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.

Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.

There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.